Teaching Empathy and Compassion: Nahr el-Bared and the Plight of Palestinians in Lebanon

Nahr el-Bared, 2013.

The story of the destruction of Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007, at the hands of the Lebanese Armed Forces, is one among so many atrocities, that it is no wonder that we have moved on from it with haste. But I firmly believe that in history, rather than the current event, lies a greater capacity to understand the world.  Today, I want to impress upon my colleagues who teach courses about the inhumanity of warfare or military oppression across history, the importance of using filmic documentary, oral histories and testimonies of victims, in their classrooms. The war front of the Palestinian struggle for survival has never been a green line or the shifting and changing imperial alliances. Now more than ever, it is a public relations contest. 

There is tremendous power in simply showing who the victims of aggressive government policies are. I have taught students who are so far removed from the reality of war that it had never occurred to them that a simple affirmation of support of military action translates into someone’s nervous breakdown or a woman’s own familial holocaust, or a child’s lost limb, or an adult’s lifetime of displacement and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the millions of children who perished in the Nazi holocaust, we keenly feel the loss of Anne Frank more so than the others. Why? Because human beings do not have a capacity to sympathize with faceless, anonymous masses. We need to be shown individuals, we need to have the horror of war translated into a singular, personal experience. And this is exactly why I taught the Diary of Anne Frank alongside Mahmoud Darwish’s diary, Memory for Forgetfulness, and why I taught Art Spieglman’s graphic masterpiece, Maus, alongside Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Palestine. In doing so, there was no escaping the collective humanity of the victims and the individual horror of people caught in machinations of extraordinarily unnecessary loss and destruction. 

Some of you may remember that the university where I taught made the decision to excise the Palestinian content. I walked away from that battle because, put simply, the insidious psychological warfare had by that point ravished and decimated my soul, and had taken such a toll on me that I, in the absence of collegial, personal and institutional support,  was not able to stand up and fight. I admire the likes of Steven Salaita who did, and won. I did not win, but I have survived and I can still write and I still have the privilege of a voice that is heard and words that are read.

Much talk of Israeli apartheid exists but we have yet to name the Lebanese apartheid, we have yet to just as loudly acknowledge the depth and breadth of Lebanese oppression of Palestinians. Nahr al-Bared Talks Back is an important documentary film that collects oral histories from survivors and gives a palatable context to the depth and breadth of the oppression that students will be able to relate to and find palatable. The film has all but disappeared. Its official website http://www.nahrelbaredfilm.org/ is no longer in use and the Norwegian institution (CMI) which funded the project offers no viewing or institutional purchasing options. For this reason, I choose to discuss some of the film’s content here.

The film tells us that Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was founded in 1949 and is located near the Lebanese Syrian border, in the far north, some fifteen kilometers beyond the city of Tripoli. The camp was and is home to Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948, most of whom had fled Galilee at that time. The film does not tell us that Nahr el-Bared is actually two camp sites, the original one and another that began to be settled in nearby rural plains as the refugee population increased. Like other camps in Lebanon, Nahr el-Bared, prior to its destruction, was organized into suburbs that reflected the names of the locations from which various people come. For example, those who were displaced in 1948 from Sa3sa3, now lived in a neighborhood called Sa3sa3, and those who had once lived in Safad now lived in the Safad neighborhood of the camp.

Palestinians have an extraordinary way of preserving the Palestine they were forced to flee in 1948 in a relentless and tenacious collective memory. I recall one woman from Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut telling me how she had visualized the Palestinian village she came from, because her grandmother had given her such vivid accounts of the place. One day, she said, a news report was showing images from the village and she was able to recognize it even before the reporter named the location. She said the experience felt surreal -- to have known a place she had never been was spiritually elevating.  After the Lebanese Armed Forces destroyed the old camp and with the new reconstruction underway, these old neighborhoods have been erased; the social and cultural fabric of a people numerously displaced, faces further potential erosion. It is a little known fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces targeted the original campsite in their relentless 4-month destruction, when the alleged reason for their bombing, to destroy an Islamist group known as Fateh al-Islam, should have targeted the newer campsite where the two hundred or so fighters had taken fort.¹

One resident of the camp with whom I found myself in conversation, had lived there all his life and was now working in Beirut. He reminisced that after the end of the Lebanese civil war, Nahr el Bared experienced a time of commercial prosperity.  He recalled that in those days the best road from Tripoli and across to the Syrian border actually ran through the camp, leading to an influx of traffic, and by consequence, commerce. What’s more, the resident added, merchandise was competitively priced, making camp merchants the more desirable resource for shoppers from outside. This was due to the camp’s proximity to the docking ports near Tripoli, he added. The Lebanese Armed Forces completely razed the camp to the ground. Gone was that commercial stretch of highway and even as late as 2013, when I visited six years after the battle, the roads had still not been repaved. Much of the destruction was not even yet removed. An UNRWA School had been built, a modest facility, which stands in sharp contrast to its surrounds. A new school is to be found but no reasonable roadway leading to it or any of the infrastructure one would normally associate with a brand new school building. Looking out of the window from one of the classrooms, another one of my companions pointed to the skeletal remains of ghost buildings in the distance. “I had an apartment in that building over there. Every time I look at it, I get angry,” she said. 

Nahr el-Bared, 2013

Nahr el-Bared residents did not take up arms to defend the camp, because no one felt that this battle was theirs. No one had any desire to defend Fateh al-Islam who were a foreign militant entity, seeking to establish an Islamic emirate,² spilling out of the conflict in Syria and into Lebanon’s north. For this reason too, the then Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Signiora, declared that the Palestinian people were not the target of the military’s assault and had regrettably been caught in the cross fire. While this was symbolically all nice and fluffy, the actuality on the ground couldn’t be far from the truth. The behavior of the Lebanese soldiers was remorseless in many instances, as the film Nahr el-Bared Talks Back recounts through survivor testimony. A young man tells us how he and a group of other young men were detained and stripped naked, while some were beaten, and all were interrogated for no legitimate reason other than that they had remained in the camp when most others had fled. In his soft, evidently traumatized voice, he tells us:

When [the soldier] asked me why I was still in the camp, I told him, “why, where do I live? I live in the camp.” He asked me “why didn’t you leave with the people who left?” I told him “ I didn’t know things were going to get this bad. I was sitting in my house. In the end I’m not Fateh Islam.” He asked me what I did. He was asking every single guy what he did for a living. So for example, one of the young men told him “I’m a mechanic.” The officer told him “you worked as a mechanic, or did you fix machines and tools for Fateh al-Islam? Another guy told him “I’m a baker,” and so he said to him “so you used to bake and make food for Fateh al-Islam?” When he came to me he asked me what do I do for a living. I told him “I’m a musician, I play at parties and weddings.”  He went quiet. What could he say, when I tell him “music,” of course he couldn’t say to me “you used to play music for Fateh al-Islam.”

Another survivor, recounting his detention also wonders how, given the military restriction under which the Palestinian camp exists, was it possible for Fateh al-Islam to nest in the camp and to bring in so much arsenal with which they were able to fight the Lebanese army. When every Palestinian has to enter at a military checkpoint, showing a residential ID and when every outsider or foreigner must have a permit to enter the camp, how did Fateh al-Islam manage what they did? Sociologists Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi contend that the origins of the group can be traced back to the allegedly secular Fatah al-Intifada, a militarized faction that was armed by the Syrian regime in Lebanon’s far north in the 1980s in opposition to the remaining PLO fighters who had withdrawn from elsewhere in Lebanon.³

An off-screen man curates the graffiti left by Lebanese soldiers on the ruins, among them are: “Thank you Shaker al-Abbsi [one of the three leaders of Fateh al-Islam, responsible for a contingent of fifty Palestinian fighters, predominantly hailing from Syria⁴] because you allowed us to enter Ali Baba’s Grotto.” The reference to Ali Babba’s Grotto must be in relation to the looting and ransacking that took place, given that the mythical grotto was full of untold riches.  Other graffiti reads “In revenge for al-Abbas.” And “In revenge for al-Damour.”  While al-Damour references a Lebanese coastal town that saw fierce fighting between al-Kata’eb and the PLO during the Lebanese civil war some two decades earlier, al-Abbas may be in reference to Mohamad Zeidan, the Palestinian political leader who founded the Palestinian Liberation Front in Lebanon. Off screen, the graffiti’s curator passionately tells us that this graffiti demonstrates that “this was a war programmed not against Fateh al-Islam but against the Palestinian people.” Given the final statistics, one can see the off-screen curator’s reason for believing this. In eliminating less than 250 Fateh al-Islam fighters, the Lebanese Armed Forces managed to kill approximately 40 Palestinian civilians as collateral damage and to displace and further impoverish 30, 000 camp residents. Many of them, to this day still live in the neighboring camp of al-Badawi, still awaiting reconstruction of their homes, eight years later. The Armed Forces’ brutal decimation of Nahr el-Bared was not met with condemnation. In fact, the heavy handed assault was hailed as a victory against global terrorism. Nahr el-Bared Talks Back tells a more important story, it tells the story of those whose voices are actively muzzled, preventing us from hearing their dignified and very human call for justice. As one man, speaking to a foreign camera, in the midst of the siege, says:

We are a people who have been unjustly treated (mathloomeen). If they want to exterminate us and kill us, let them kill us, but before they kill us they shouldn’t also be unjust toward us. Please convey to the international general public that we are trapped here with our children, and we can’t find water, and we can’t find bread, and we can’t find medicine. 

Notes

¹This point is illuminated by Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi in their critical and in-depth study “(In)Security and Reconstruction in Post-Conflict Nahr Al-Barid Refugee Camp,” published in the Journal of Palestine Studies XL(1), 2010: 34.

² ibid, 33

³ Briefly after the end of the Israeli invasion in 2006, Hassan and Hanafi contend, that a “large group of Salafist militants arrived in Nahr al-Barid camp during that period as part of the well-established and ostensibly secular Fatah al-Intifada faction through the intervention of its Damascus-based general secretary, Abu Khaled Amleh. The newcomers initially remained within the faction’s military bases, supposedly as members, but it appears that an internal coup had taken place in which the Salafists had essentially taken over Fatah al-Intifada’s bases for themselves. On 26 November 2006, the man subsequently revealed to be the group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, announced the creation of Fatah al-Islam” (ibid, 32).

⁴ Fatah al-Islam’s “decidedly nonlocal character was confirmed by the Lebanese Judiciary Council, which listed its composition as follows: 69 Lebanese nationals, approximately 50 Palestinians (the vast majority from Syria), 43 Saudis, 12 Syrians, 1 Tunisian, 1 Algerian, 1 Yemeni, and 1 Iraqi” (ibid, 33).

Filmmakers Who Feature Arab Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Characters

Yes, I dared to use “Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual,” partly because the films themselves depicted identities, not simply behaviors, and partly because I have never really found it epistemically pernicious to engage in cultural translations and historical equivalencies. A lot has happened since the publication of Chapter 6 of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East. That was the chapter in which I discussed a number of mainstream Egyptian films that depicted some form of queer text, character or subtext. Here are some films that came out in the last decade that are just waiting for some serious analytical attention.

Tool ‘Omri/All My Life (2008)
Made on a shoe string budget, with a non-professional cast and crew, this is one of my favorite gay Arab films. Don’t be put off by the independent-film budget, pay attention to the dialogue and rejoice in the power of a community-driven production. Set before and during the Cairo 52 case that rocked the Egyptian homosexual underworld in 2001, filmed in Egypt and San Francisco, the film is written and directed by Maher Sabry, himself an Egyptian exile who had to flee state persecution
Just in case you have been living in a hermitage in the Himalayas for the past fifteen years, the Cairo 52 case was an incident in which Egyptian police raided a gay nightclub, a show boat named the Queen Boat that was moored on the Nile. The police arrested 52 Egyptian men predominantly from the impoverished classes. The arrests were followed by a pernicious trial which was covered extensively in the media (and John Scagliotti’s documentary film Dangerous Living). Sabry was one of the whistle-blowers who alerted LGBT rights organizations to the arrests and for this he won the Felipa De Souza award in 2002. Maher Sabry was interviewed, albeit briefly, for Scaglioti’s film and also appeared in the short documentary I Exist (2003), although the depth and breadth of his creative intellect is yet to be explored in a feature interview.

There is a lot to love about Sabry’s film! I am not in the least deterred by the allegation that it contained “gratuitous nudity,” making it “just another gay film.” Nor am I deterred by the occasionally grainy acting or low budget filming, because there is a consistent intersectional critique throughout the film, the intelligence of which you are not likely to see in “just another gay film.” For example, I love that Sabry, probably in the tradition of Ihna Btoo’ il-Otobyss (1979), shows police brutality and torture in Egyptian prisons. That he is able to tell the stories of men persecuted by the state in this way, alone deserves a mark of respect.

I also admire how Sabry is able to demonstrate the privileges accorded to Western citizenship and/or socioeconomic status, which translate into being “above the law,” since state police seem to invariably target men who cannot pay their way through the system or who do not have the right connections to protect them. Sabry also shows that exclusive homosexuality can operate without epistemological and identitarian tentacles, just as we see in the case of the country boy, Atef (played by Maged), who lacks the pretension of his modernized counterpart, Rami (Mazen Nassar). Atef’s character stands in sharp contrast to Abd Raboh, the “he’s not really a homosexual” character, played by Bassem Samra, in the blockbuster film, The Yacoubian Building (2006). Abd Raboh, also a peasant from the country, is depicted in a such a way as to reinforce the stereotype that homosexuals are passive parties and whose active partners are, if anything, hypersexual heterosexuals, because their penetration of other men makes the latter women.

One gripe you could have with Tool ‘Omry, which I don’t really share, is that there are no real female characters in the film. Dalia, Rami’s best friend, is a virginal, sexless angel, more or less. But Jwana, the actor who played Dalia and the film’s co-producer, passionately disagrees. “Dalia….grew tired of fighting and struggling on a daily basis in a religious society. After she moved to San Francisco, [and] like so many other free-thinker women of al-mahjar, she wanted to do something to change the miserable state of our Arab world. We all know the rest of the real story and what happened to hundreds of Dalias in Tahrir.”

In light of the renewed persecution of gay men in Egypt (following Mona al-Iraqi’s TV exposé of an alleged gay bathhouse in Ramsys in 2014), the film needs to be seen by audiences worldwide, now more than ever. The recent Egyptian law permitting the state to deport foreign nationals for homosexual activity, also changes the landscape since Sabry’s film, which was critical of the privilege accorded by the State to sex tourists hailing from the West. Unfortunately, as vital as this film is to international discussions, an English release of the DVD has not yet transpired. And since the film is predominantly in Arabic (YouTube preview not withstanding), it is now out of reach to English-speaking audiences. The great news is, seven years later, the English-subtitle DVD release is due this year, according to the film’s co-producer (and co-actor), Bassam Kassab. On an interesting side note, the French subtitles of the film were written by Remi Lange, the writer and director of Tariq il Hob/The Road to Love (2001), another excellent, low-budget independent gay film we are going to be having a look at below. Rémi Lange is also the distributor of the French DVD version of Tool ‘Omri in France, Belgium and Switzerland. The film has also been released with German sub-titles in Germany and Austria. I cannot stress it enough, this is not a film to be missed.

If you find Sabry’s work compelling, you might be happy to learn that he and Bassam Kassab teamed up on another feature-length, Sin Visa, which was directed by Ana Simões and premiered at the landmark Roxie Theatre, in San Francisco, earlier this year. Sin Visa contains a gay Arab couple and sees Kassab’s return to the big screen as writer and actor sporting that same infectious grin we see in his role as minor character, Hatem, in Tool ‘Omry.

Tarik il-Hob/The Road to Love (2001)

Tariq il-Hob predates Tool ‘Omry by six years, and it was co-written and directed by the French Filmmaker Remi Lange and released in 2001. With the exception of one word (I believe, it’s “inshalla”) the entire film’s dialogue is in French. It is set predominantly in Paris, with perhaps the last twenty minutes of the film being shot in Morocco. Lange does a very interesting job of telling the story of Karim (played by Karim Tarek), a sociology student who decides to do one of his assignments, a video documentary, on homosexuality among men of North African descent in Paris. At that point, Karim has a girlfriend named Sihem (played by Sihem Benamoune) and hasn’t really given much thought to exploring his sexuality beyond his relationship with her. He soon meets one of his interviewees, a handsome young man named Farid (Riyad Echahi) and the story line unfolds predictably around Karim coming to terms with attraction to a patient, yet unrelenting Farid. If Tool ‘Omry was ever criticized for brandishing too much nudity, surprisingly, Tariq il Hob abstains from gratuity. On the contrary, it approaches male homosexual attraction with an unusual emphasis on emotions, and the need for bonds of certitude, and does not depict male sexuality in the usual fast-pace-disposability we see in gay male cinema generally speaking. At the same time, it does not represent gay men as the typically castrated homosexuals suitable for mainstream consumption—the film finds a healthy and invigorating balance. Lange’s films are not for mainstream audiences, and Tarik il-Hob made the rounds in the LGBT film festival circuit, so there is something to be said about his choice to resist giving the stereotypical film viewer what they came for (no pun intended). The DVD of Tariq il-Hob is available for purchase, along with English subtitles, it also includes extra footage that didn’t make it into the final cut.

My personal delight in this film is seeing a very young Abdallah Taia after the release of his first book, which, he complains elicited no response from his home country, Morocco. Of course, fast forward thirteen years and Taia is writing editorials in the New York Times, publishing critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical works and even making a directorial debut as a filmmaker himself. It is Taia also who discusses the homosexual marriage contracts found in the Egyptian Oasis of Siwa at the turn of the twentieth century, and it is from him again that we hear about a city in Algeria, which in the 1950s, is said to have also had a tradition of homosexual marriage contracts. I also felt that the inclusion of references to Rumi and Jean Genet were both particularly apt endeavors on the part of the writers to claim culturally-specific same-sex sexual encounters, histories and personages, contrasting them with a more contemporary violence, particularly targeted at the so called “passive” homosexual man. Like Tool ‘Omry, it’s not surprising that women are represented by one minority character and in this instance it’s Sihem, Karim’s girlfriend, who makes a gracious and early exit that allows him to further explore his sense of self.

Sukar Banat/Caramel (2007)

Nadine Labaki’s debut film is gorgeous. It was the film chosen for the Arab Film Festival’s opening night in Sydney, where I first beheld it in 2008. In his opening remarks about the film, University of Melbourne Professor of Anthropology, Ghassan Hage, said that it was a film whose critique of Lebanese social ills was “made with love,” and he was right. It’s nice enough watching a film made by a woman director, but the film also has a soft spot, an open wound—the dull, subtle pain of which, lingers long after the film has ended. To trivialize it, we can call it a “chick flick,” since it centers on the lives of a group of women who are brought together in humorous scenes at Leila’s (played by Labaki) hair dressing salon. Leila is dating a married man, whom we never see because he stands her up. We see her trying to book a hotel room in Beirut, having no luck, since she doesn’t have proof of her marital relationship, a restriction I was not aware was still observed in cosmopolitan Beirut. Her assistant and friend, Nisrine (Yasmine al-Masri), has a hymen reconstruction procedure because she cannot bring herself to tell her fiancée that she is not a virgin, while her other friend, Jamale (Gisèle Aouad), is a single mother of two and an actress, who fakes her menses and actively lies about her age in an effort to remain competitive with younger, more beautiful women in an industry of substantial cruelty to women.

If it weren’t for Leila’s co-worker at the salon, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), the film would not make this list. Rima is an interesting character in a film that endeavors to catalogue the tragic restrictions imposed on women socially, whether that they must compete for beauty and youth or feign chastity or be treated like play things by married men. Enter Rima who, we are shown, is not interested in the young man who clearly wants to initiate some kind of romantic involvement. She is also lovingly chastised by her friends for her lack of self-beautification. We see her get mobbed by her friends and subjected to waxing of her body hairs in anticipation of Nisrine’s wedding. We also see Rima give what may seem like a look of longing, an expression of both loneliness and alienation, when a woman sits next to her on the bus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much get communicated without words about sexuality in an Arabic-language film before. No one ever says that Rima is a lesbian, we don’t see her go out on dates with women, she never articulates the reasons for her seeming alienation, but it’s further intimated in her interaction with a salon patron who comes in regularly to have her hair washed. At the end of the film, that patron asks to her have her long hair cut short, which for some reason or another, is a symbol for breaking away with society and tradition.

Placed in context of the film as a whole, it’s clear that Rima is another archetype of woman who is not being given the space to assert individuality or to live comfortably, according to her desires. She is a likeable character, albeit marginal to the film, and her depiction is a safe one. There’s nothing confronting about her; mainstream audience members may not even have it register on their radar that she may be anything other than a quiet, shy and lonely girl. But, I think that kind of sensibility is effective; it’s not pushing the envelope too far, it’s not starting a conversation about a subject, which for many, remains unspeakable, but it is acknowledging the subject’s existence and the silences that are built up around such existences.

Bidoon Raqaba/Uncensored (2009)

Anyone who has read enough of my work probably notices that I am not a fan of critique for critique’s sake. I find that kind of pompousness tiresome. It’s like we academics have to find something lacking in everything we see in order to justify our salaries. But frankly, I did have to suffer through this film to give you this little note on it. But before we get to the suffering, let’s focus on the joy. The film was entertaining, in part, because it was a film about university students in their final year of their law degrees, and the film contains so many party scenes involving disaffected youth getting drunk or high, that might invoke, for some, memories (or lack thereof) of misspent youth. I also liked that all the sex that is had in this film is defiantly non-marital in a country experiencing a religious backlash. The God-fearing character, Ibrahim (played by Bassem Samrah from The Yacoubian Building and Sarkhat Untha), who spends much of the film sermonizing to his “lost” friends about abstaining from sex and alcohol, and observing prayer, turns out to be human after all, with the same desires as his peers. He is depicted as reprehensible and hypocritical by the end of the film, no doubt a critique of the Muslim brotherhood and their discourse. This connects comfortable with Sabry’s depiction of his repressed fundamentalist character, Ahmad, in Tool ‘Omry.

There are a lot of elements in the film on which its makers ought to be commended, but I found the 4 or 5 music video clips interspersed throughout this film excruciating to sit through. For example, seemingly out of nowhere, the main character (played by well-known Egyptian singer, Ahmad Fahmi) suddenly bursts into song. The filmmaker, Hani Georges Fawzi, was perhaps trying to capitalize on Fahmi’s fan base, but sitting through the sudden music clips was definitely a first-world problem I would have been happy to fast forward through.

I’m also slightly, but not very, disappointed in Shareen (Alaa’ Ghanem), the resident bisexual character in this film. I am glad she made it on screen and was given some unapologetic, self-asserting lines that we have never heard on the Egyptian cinema screen before. I am not glad that she is depicted as a sexual predator of innocent women, and that her background story is that she had been preyed on in seventh grade by her cousin who initiates her into homosexual behavior. I know the film, which is ironically titled Uncensored, was in fact censored several times and there were many compromises that had to be made with the censorship board for its release to be allowed, so I do wonder what the authors had to compromise on and whether Shareen’s character was different from what she ended up being. Nonetheless, despite the depictions of her predatory behavior of uninitiated women, Shareen delivers some lines for which one is infinitely grateful, given the context of the film’s audience and the pernicious stereotypes that permeate about same-sex desire and behavior. And given the film is not accessible in English subtitles, we will wrap up this article resolving that accessibility issue. Enjoy!

After Shareen sleeps with a male friend of hers, Karim, he asks her “when you’re with a girl, which one of you is the man and which is the woman?” To this she replies: “What stupidity is this? Are we in a group of morons or what?”

“No, but seriously, you two are the same, how do you do these things?”

“Like what you and I were doing now.”

“But that’s natural. A man and a woman.”

“And when I’m with a girl, I’m acting according to my nature.”

“Ok, what do you feel when you are with them?”

“What you feel when you are with me.”

“Well, then, which one are you? The man or the woman?”

“I’m both.”

In a scene a little later on in the film, we see Shareen with her new love interest, a girl procured for her by a friend, who says to her that she is not comfortable with what they are doing together. “This is haram [forbidden]. I heard a sheikh say this is haram.” Shareen replies: “Oh, and you didn’t hear the Sheikh who said eating cucumbers was forbidden?” Shareen is not joking, absurd fatwas (religious decrees) are released intermittently, and the forbiddance of eating cucumbers, since they resemble the phallus, is not an invention of her own imagination. But perhaps my favorite line by Shareen is when she is speaking to Ibrahim, the religiously observant character who asks her to repent and stop defying God (but is actually interested in sleeping with her). “We both defy God, but I don’t lie to myself, while you don’t know how to lie to people.” These comments are particularly powerful in light of the renewed popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a country that has been grappling with its social and cultural identity, oscillating between liberalism and religious conservatism, since independence was attained in the 1950s.

Finally, I appreciate this film and its Shareen because she does not die at the end! Nor does she turn out to be a vampire! Two usual endings that the Hollywood celluloid bisexual still meets with.

*Originally published on July 25, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/filmmakers-who-feature-arab-gay-lesbian-and-bisexual-characters/  now discontinued.

What Not to Wear: On Growing Up a Girl

My mother made sure that each one of her children had a photo album that tracked their growth from infancy to early adolescence. This is more challenging than you might at first imagine. Not only are we talking about analogue photography and exposure, but we are talking about the context of a hell of a civil war, and like almost all Palestinian refugees in Lebanon we were always financially challenged. But she did it, she managed it. Fortunately for me, I can trace the evolution of my dressing style with ease due to this fabulous photo album. I also happen to have an unusually strong set of early childhood memories.

My first memory had to have happened prior to August 1982 because the persons in it perished in the Israeli bombing of a building in Sanayeh (a suburb in Beirut), at that time. This must mean that I was less than two years old when I registered and retained my first memory. I can also guess the timeline of other early memories due to this kind of location. I know that we left the Southern Suburbs when the Amal militias made life for Palestinians impossible during their siege and wars on the camps in the mid eighties. In the streets of Beirut, they would round up Palestinian civilians and execute them, going door to door, looking for those of us who did not live in the camps. When I revisited and relived Lebanon, twenty years later, I had the misfortune of taking a ride with a taxi driver who got a bit sweet on me. When I told him I was Palestinian he was surprisingly undeterred but went on to tell me how he was once mistaken for one, and before he knew it, lay virtually unconscious on the floor and was moments away from execution, when they decided at the last moment to check his ID card before pulling the trigger. But I digress. Let's go back to building that timeline alongside the photo album that I am not going to show you. In the mid-eighties, my family fled this context of murderous persecution and left behind yet another house, home and belongings, and we relocated out of the Southern Suburbs to the coastline, near Hamra. At the time I was between four and five years old.

The transition in my dress code takes place well before our move to Hamra, as can be evidenced in the location of the photographs. My guess is that this took place between the ages of three or four.  The early photographs present me in dresses, very cute dresses mind you! And shortly thereafter, when I develop my own consciousness of what clothes allow or inhibit, you cease to be able to see me in a dress. And I can tell you how that happened. You can't climb trees or ladders or play soccer or kick bullies in a dress. At least that was my reasoning. I remember it, clearly, dresses inhibited my desire for motion, they revealed underwear all too readily and I was not amenable to such restrictions. My transition from wearing dresses to pants, in those first instances was purely on a practical rather than an aesthetic basis. There was also that added problem of the way I liked to sit. I didn't do legs together when I sit. It was just not appropriate for me to sit with my legs together. And thus began a lifelong tradition that I would attempt to undo in my early teens, in a self-conscious effort to fit into the final years of all-girls Catholic schooling in Sydney, Australia. Those last couple of years of school were so torturous, but you can't say I didn't try. But whenever I did, I felt like I was pretending to be someone else, I felt like a cross dresser. But that doesn't mean that I ever felt like a man in women's clothes, or like a woman in men's clothes. These were the value judgements imposed (and are still being imposed) on me by the gender police wherever I may be in the world.

When I was a child, I never had any confusion about being a girl, I never desired to be anything other than what I was biologically. I knew I was a girl. I loved it. Had I been born a boy I would've been like every other boy, and if I wore dresses like all the other girls (yes, there was no one else around like me growing up), then I would have been like every other girl. I liked being different. I liked who I was. I remember being in a car on the Syrian border, talking to my older sister and my mother, so this would have to have been in 1989 when I was 9 years old. I remember telling them this: "I love being a girl, and a strong girl, I don't want to be a boy." I remember them congratulating me on this and quickly moving to another conversation topic and I remember wishing that they'd spent a little bit more time discussing this with me.

Throughout my entire childhood, I have had to convince people that I am what my biological sex designates me as, despite the constructed phenomenology to the contrary. More often than not, people did not allow me to assert this individual truth. I was always told either "you are a boy" or "you want to be a boy" or "you're a tomboy." I think it is for this reason that I can really feel for transgender children. By 'transgender' here I mean an individual whose biological sex is distinct from their  psychic experience of themselves. Both transgender children and I have spent our childhoods trying to get people to understand who we really are and have had the problem of being told that we are NOT what we know ourselves to be. My problem is the inverse of that of the psychically transgender child. I always felt like I had to fight for being recognized as biologically female, whereas my transgender counterpart has to fight for being psychically male or female in contradistinction from the outward manifestations of biological sex.

While Palestinians in Lebanon of the 80s suffered such horrendous persecutions on every level of society, from the purges at the hands of the Kata'eb or 7arket Amal or Israeli brutalization, to name a few, my persecutors were the gender police at the Lebanese Catholic school I attended. But despite this, I didn't just survive, I thrived. In the marketplace and on the street and whenever I came in contact with the dense mélange of West Beirut's cosmopolity, I thrived. I doubt I would have received an equally enthusiastic reception if I had been an effeminate boy. I also thrived because while the gender police were actively trying to destroy my spirit at school, the situation at home afforded me such tremendous acceptance and love. Sometimes I wonder, would I have been able to write the books I have written and speak on the topics I have broached with the courage that is required to do so, if it weren't for that early unconditional love and acceptance? I think not.

When my first sister got married, this was in 1991 and I was ten years old. I hadn't worn a dress in at least 5 years at that point. I wasn't forced to do it either. I obliged. I obliged because I was implored to do so, so that I could be in my sister's bridal party. We all wore these hyper-cliched girls' mini-wedding dresses that have frills and layers and ribbons, etc., etc. I still think I looked ridiculous in it, with my short scruffy hair, but it was a fun costume. I felt kind of like children in the US must feel when they dress up for Halloween. Between the time I walked out of our apartment building and the time I arrived at the church,  I had my mini-wedding dress caught on so many edges, like car bumpers and stair rails, that in the space of a half hour, the frills were almost entirely ripped off. It wasn't something I did consciously, not at all, I just wasn't used to my clothes being so far away from my body. Once again, dresses proved to be an impractical restriction of motion in tight urban spaces and I would retire the dress until a further five years, when it would finally dawn upon me that people hate you, really hate you for who you are, and you should try to conform. I did, for a couple of years, where I would occasionally wear a dress. Eventually, however,  I came to the re-realization that the problem was not me. It was them.

Islam, Alcohol and Charee Stanley's Religious Freedom

Charee Stanley is a Muslim flight attendant, who was suspended by her employer, Express Jet, for refusing to serve alcohol to passengers. Stanley recently filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. During a brief appearance on The View, Stanley and her lawyer, Lena Masri, put forward a compelling argument for exploring the protection of her religious freedom.  Masri responded intelligently to the question of whether this is a case that is similar to that of Kim Davis, the Kentucky civil servant who refuses to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. If you'd like to see this brief exchange, see it here.

I personally relish actual, not token, diversity in the workplace. If I were Stanley's boss, I would continue to accommodate her request to refrain from serving alcohol and delegating this task to a colleague, because, as she argues, serving alcohol is a non-essential function of the condition of her employment. But, if I were Stanley's friend, or community member, I would suggest to her that Islam is not a closed set of commandments. Too often we hear "Islam says this, Islam does that..." or "In Islam there is no this...." People make this mistake with their religions all the time. They objectify them, making rigid certainties out of otherwise complex, multifurcated discursive structures. They forget that religion, vis-a-vis scripture, is a living, organic process, that in this case is 1400 years old. I might say to Charee Stanley, if I found her open to my suggestions, that the early Muslim community founded in Madinah was a minority community that had to coexist with a non-Muslim majority. It was here, in this condition, that many of the rituals that Islam shares with Judaism came to be infused in the way the faith is practiced today. The lesson learned from that period is that a Muslim living in a non-Muslim majority context may make adjustments in order to function more effectively as the case may require. For example, in recent years, the Islamic establishment responded by giving women reprieve from donning variations of 7ijab in countries where prohibition of these could lead to hardship for observant Muslim women. If you're fluent in Arabic you can listen to Sheikh al-Tantawi from al-Azhar issue this decree here.

I might also tell Charee that for the Abbasids of Iraq, the drinking of date wine was permitted and that folktales of the period are riddled with stories of Muslims undertaking some interesting libations. I could add that for the sufis, worship is the greatest form of intoxication one could ever aspire to and this is why Omar Khayyam's poetry uses the analogy of drinking wine to refer to communion with Allah. I might tell her of the most beautiful poetry that alcohol has inspired under the patronage of Islamic caliphs from Baghdad to al-Andalus. Finally, I would indicate what is to this day a very controversial realization. There is no verse in the Quran that sets punishment for the consumption of alcohol, or that expressly forbids it in the way other matters, like fornication, are explicitly forbidden.

In Surat al-Nisa', verse 23, we read: يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَقْرَبُوا الصَّلَاةَ وَأَنْتُمْ سُكَارَىٰ حَتَّىٰ تَعْلَمُوا مَا تَقُولُونَ // O, ye who believe, do not approach prayer while you are intoxicated, so that you may know what you are saying (translations are mine). This verse came down, evidently, at a time where Muslims were not observing complete abstinence from alcohol. According to the researcher Ali al-Muqri, in his book Al-Khamr Wa al-Nabeeth Fi al-Islam, the verse was inspired by an incident, in which one of the prophet's companions accidentally said أعوذ بالشيطان الرجيم // I seek strength in Satan, as opposed to what he should have said, I seek strength in God from Satan.The companion was trying to pray whilst drunk and the advice in the Quran is that you shouldn't pray if you're drunk because you need to know what you're saying.

In Surat al-Baqara, verse 219, we read: يسئلونكَ عنِ الخمرِ والمَيسرِ قُلْ فيهما إثمٌ كبيرٌ ومَنافِعُ للناسِ وإثمهما أكبرُ مِن نَفْعِهما//They ask you about wine and gambling, tell them there is great wrong-doing in both of those and that the sin in them is greater than the benefit. The word إثمٌ is almost universally translated as "sin" but here it can function as an "adverse effect." No sin is said to have a potential benefit, or does it?

In Surat al-Ma2ida, verse 90, we read: يا أيُّها الذينَ ءامنوا إنَّما الخمرُ والمَيسرُ والأنصابُ والأزلامُ رِجْسٌ مِنْ عملِ الشيطانِ فاجتَنِبوهُ لعلَّكُم تُفلِحون // Oh, ye who believe, alcohol, gambling, pagan ritual and divination are the ugly work of Satan, avoid him so that you may be saved. This is the advice I would expect to hear from a parent who has been there and done that, to a child who just might get carried away in seeking unfettered pleasure, it's not the eternal fireplace that stokes our contemporary imaginations when we think of Islam and alcohol.

We find, when we look closely at the Quran, that a lot of what we take for granted as essentially Islamic is not. The story is quite different when it comes to the spoken traditions, al-ahadeeth, of the Prophet, whereby multiple sources are said to have indicated forbiddance of consumption and handling of alcohol. And here is where the question of religious freedom becomes all important. One is free to choose one's religion and free to practice it, but there is also another freedom you can accord yourself. This is the freedom to seek the truth of scripture for yourself. Should you abstain from this freedom, then your convictions are those that others have arrived at, but without the intellectual process that brought those convictions into being. Under such circumstances, I wonder if religious freedom is truly possible.

 

The Lesson We Should Have Learned from A Gay Girl in Damascus

I recently watched Sophie Deraspe's documentary A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year. For those of you who don't remember, the Amina Arraf hoax involved an American man* and his wife, who had been traveling in Syria when the civil unrest began to brew. The man authored a character, Amina Arraf, whose blog contained anti-regime and pro-revolutionary rhetoric, that was quite in keeping with the spirit of the early civil uprising. Thus, it became instantly believable that such a young activist, who also happens to be gay, may very well be under threat of persecution by the state. From February to June of 2011, Amina Arraf was in the eyes of the world a real person. Electronic Intifada investigators caught out the hoax when a post was made, allegedly by Amina's cousin, that Amina had been captured by the regime.

This is not an easy film to sit through if the civil war in Syria means something personal to you. Deraspe includes footage of such breath-taking violence that it is hard not to be triggered by it, time and time again. The sheer horror of the context which is exploited for the vanity of a middle aged ESL teacher, makes his grand deception all the more despicable.

The film focuses on one of two of the hoax's victims. A young French woman who has an online affair with Amina Arraf, who falls in love with her and who shares moments of tremendous intimacy and sensuousness with her. What the film does not disclose is that Amina Arraf had left in "her" wake a long string of deceived lesbians and bisexual women with whom "she" had numerous online liaisons. In 2011, I was a member of a closed Facebook group that Amina had infiltrated. Someone from the group had invited "her" and "she" was posting regularly. Needless to say, she had many an admirer, and it was not until the truth came out that people started to share their stories of their online encounters and conversations with her. After the horrible news came out the secret group was disbanded.

That Amina Arraf turned out to be a heterosexual man should not have mortified our little online community as much as it did. After all, lesbian chat rooms have more men in them than they do lesbians, and this has been the case since the dawn of lesbian chat room time. But this was a secret group, not everyone in it was out, some people were extremely worried about exposure and we were supposed to have known better. You weren't supposed to invite someone to the group if you didn't know, first hand, that she was a bonafide, certified, Arab/Middle East/North African queer woman. The numerous women who had sexual liaisons with Amina Arraf, under false pretenses, were unarguably subjected to sexual violence, of this there can be no doubt. What is more, though, I do hope that what that collective experience pointed to, besides a renewed, collective realization of our vulnerability, is the falsity of the online encounter altogether. Regardless of whether the person on the other end is intent on deceiving us or not, this medium of communication functions in such a way as to leave us to fantastically fill in the gaps (in our knowledge of someone) with our own delusory projections. This is a perfectly wonderful and healthy digression into the fantastic if we are aware of ourselves doing it, but when we are unaware, it can potentially be very destructive.

The truth of the matter is, we as  a lesbian community which includes many women who have none of the privileges of social normalization or visibility, have become so reliant on online contact for developing relationships and  romantic liaisons. We risk falling in love with people who are almost entirely figments of our imaginations; figments we may have constructed, or figments that may have been constructed for us. Either way, it seems as though we are in a technological adolescence and it was my hope that the Amina Arraf hoax would at least lead to an awakening out of this curious, unwitting dis-connectedness from the actuality of the person at the other end.

*I deliberately forgo the use of names.

Murders in North Africa

For several years after my departure from the Australian academic climate, I spent my time travelling and living in the Middle East, meeting with LGBTIQ rights activists from throughout the region. I soon realized that it was not in the interest of these activists, nor their beneficiaries, to publish any of my work that I had collected on the subject. While I had originally intended to write my findings in my forthcoming book, I realized that to do so would be irresponsible. At the same time, you can’t really publish academic work without proper references, factual details and exact information that can be corroborated. But nevertheless, I’ve spent the last few years wondering what to do with this information that I have.

There was one particular set of data from North Africa which left a lasting impression on me. I have wanted to share the information, no matter how imprecise and when the idea for this website came up, I took heart that it is perhaps now time. I am relaying information shared with me without having substantiated the alleged facts, with the exception of those that were reported in North African media. I have been haunted by the fact that some of these victims never had their stories heard and their murders never investigated, and I have wanted to do something to address this. It is for this reason that I share the below with you about a period of time between August 2010 and September 2011 in Algeria, which saw a spate of hate crimes, possibly incited by increased media attention on homosexual activity in public places.

Among the primary culprits is al-Shurooq newspaper. The newspaper has a broad circulation, reaching one million readers across the Arabic-speaking world, and it is accessible online. It began to run a series of stories about homosexual beats (cruising places) in North Africa. My analysis of the headlines that circulated clearly shows that homosexuality is depicted as a monstrosity and disease. One would expect no less. Simultaneously al-Nahar Al-Jaza’eria, an Algerian newspaper of wide circulation, was also focusing on exposing homosexual cruising places in the country. These stories produce strong reactions among the readers and the sensationalism provides unfailing high ratings, so it is no wonder that newspapers resort to this kind of “journalism.”

The newspapers may have been in league with the state apparatus as well, which was seeking to turn attention away from civil unrest and popular dissatisfaction with the state’s many political and social failings, internally and externally. These stories, wittingly or unwittingly, were inciting violence against gender and sexual minorities, and most vulnerable among these groups are always those who are visibly non-normative – feminine men, masculine women and gender ambiguous individuals. There is no way we can be certain that the media hype played a pivotal role or not in the series of uninvestigated murders that took place, but the activists’ guess is that this is exactly what they did. Fearing for their own safety and security, when stories of murdered individuals began to surface, activists were not able to follow up with police about the murders and ask why the reports were not followed by thorough investigations and why no one had ever been charged. Interestingly, the newspapers also remained silent about the killings.

The first of these murders involved two young men, aged 19 and 21, whose bodies were found at al-Ramliyeh sublet. Two months later a gay fashion designer was found naked and had been suffocated with a bag, in the gulf not far from Parliament House. Some three months later, another murder took place in Bab al-Wad, a popular suburb in the Algerian capital. The victim was a dance teacher – nicknamed Whitney, after Whitney Houston, for the complexion of his skin. He was found with his throat cut on the eve of the Festival of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha), the festival that celebrates the sacrifice of a sheep in place of Ibrahim’s son. The victim was murdered in his home and none of his possessions were taken. Locals reacted nonchalantly, including police officers, who felt that he had brought it on himself. The local newspaper did report the murder but did not indicate the possible motivation and, predictably, no one was ever brought to justice. Shortly afterwards, some one or two months later, a transsexual sex worker was murdered with a knife in Jaza’er Square near Port Saeed.

In the meantime, weekly demonstrations against the Algerian government were being organized and held by a left wing political party, the MTLD, led by Law Professor Wahran al-Karoumie. The demonstrations were largely inspired by the success of the Tunisian revolution (of January 2011) and they were relentless and growing in support. Al-Karoumie was widely respected and lauded by his students and followers alike. He was beginning to wield significant political leverage in the public arena. When a member of his party was murdered, Karoumie and his followers demanded answers. Two weeks later the government investigation claimed that two of the victim’s neighbors went to rob her and subsequently killed her, charges were laid. But shortly thereafter, al-Karoumie himself was killed and it appeared as though the incidents were related. He was murdered in the party office and no one was charged. He was survived by his wife and children. His students and followers accused the government of killing him and the entire country was galvanized against the government. Shortly thereafter, al-Nahar al-Jaza’eria published a front page headline stating that Karoumie was killed by his (male) lover.

Some time later the alleged lover and killer of Karoumie was arrested and put on trial. At the trial it was alleged that a condom, filled with the killer’s semen had been found at the scene of the crime. A train of witnesses, some forty men, took the stand to testify that they had had sexual relations with Karoumie. This instantly ended support and sympathy for him and eased pressure on the government as a consequence. The impact of this murder and its coverage was greatly felt in the underground gay community, with the occurrence of yet another unsolved murder of a gay man, this time during Ramadan.

*Originally published on July 9, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/murders-in-north-africa/ now discontinued.

Divination and Lebanese Christian Claims of the Miraculous

Let's get something straight. I have no childhood memories of women turning over their coffee cups and taking turns at reading fortunes. We did not live in tents and I didn't ride a camel to school, although I wish I had. My interest in the human endeavour to contemplate the future as though it is in some way viably accessible, began with a prehistoric IBM computer that was in my sibling's room. On that computer there was a software program for the I-Ching, or, The Book of Changes. This was my first encounter with the eastern philosophy of acausality and any endeavour to prophecy the future. As an adult, I spent years looking at divination from an Anthropological perspective.

Animal entrails, boiled oxen shoulder blades, oracles, sea shells, runes, sand, clouds, cards, numbers, vision quests, dreams, spirit possessions, talking to dead people, star and planet mythologies -- all crowded my explorations and vied for attention. Legend has it, Elvis Presley prophesied his own demise when shortly before his death he looked at a cloud and saw the face of an unhappy Jesus (I don't know if this is true).  We are a very creative species, when it comes to looking for ways to further confuse ourselves about the nature of reality and the place of our minds within it.

I visited two professional readers in Lebanon, one in east Beirut, near Sassine Square, whom I met at Cafe Najjar, and the other in Sarba, near Jounieh, at a cafe named La Tasse. In Jordan I had success in mercantile coffee cup reading but was asked to be discreet about it. I spent the better part of a year reading coffee cups for my family, friends and colleagues and developed a weekly ritual with
a colleague who seemed to possess some kind of gift of guessing.

This particular colleague was one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing of the Sibleen school bus in 1982. Back then, she was a late teen on her way home on one of the UNRWA's Vocational Center buses. Despite being clearly labeled, the bus was bombed by an Israeli airstrike during the brutal siege of Beirut. But eventually, as always, and in light of the ongoing carnage, people moved on from
the human debris. I tell my friend that her gift of seeing must be due to her facing death so closely. She describes to me in filmic detail how debris fell and instantly killed survivors who had crawled out of the burning bus with her and who were standing meters away from her when they got hit. I think of a short story by Nejmeh Habib, in which the author imagines those moments just before the bus was bombed and I tell her about it. She horrifies me with details of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, even though I spent sometime in pictorial archives and have familiarized myself with
what I thought was enough material to de-sensitize me. Evidently, I was wrong.

I recline in my seat as my friend continues with deciphering the symbols in the cup. I don't know where I'm going to find me a husband and three children, but she insists, and the boy comes first, then two girls. We do not need to have another discussion about why I won't marry the man from Tyre she had suggested to me. In the absence of the epistemic scaffolding needed to sustain a discussion on sexual orientation, we forgo such a discussion.

Lebanon had a way of connecting me to my cultural Christianity not possible in other contexts. It might be the Virgin Mary statues and shrines that you find on every second street corner, in stair wells or even out in the middle of nowhere, and in some areas of Muslim-majority concentrations like Saida. Or, it might be the locals' obsession with knowing you according to whichever confessionalism you were born into. One of the two saw me unusually declare Christianity on a daily basis.




Legend has it that Mother Mary made a miraculous apparition at Our Lady of Beshouat -- a tiny little town north of Ba'elbeck in the Beqaa Valley. Our lady of Beshouat first witnessed the miraculous apparition in 2006, when a visitor and his mother, two Muslim tourists from Syria, noticed that the statue's eyes were moving. Word got around and several people confirmed with similar reports.

It turned out to be a very lucrative summer for the small town, which until then was accessible by dirt road only. The site for the church goes back to the 1740s, where a statue of the virgin was found in one of the caves, resulting in the building of the church.

Reaching Beshouat was another one of my failures in Lebanon, it was snow season and the rental car had no muscle. Add to this the spate of kidnappings and road ambushes at the time and I had to contend myself with a distant promise to fulfill the quest in the future -- when Lebanon's far north would no longer be perturbed by rogue militias, road ambushes and kidnappings. Yes, I had aged and yes, I had officially become a cowardly adult. A younger Samar would have thrown caution to the wind and figured out a way to deal with quick sand and avalanches to reach Beshouat on the new year's eve.  Instead, I ended up having a minor car accident with a young man named Charbel! In addition to the legend of our Lady of Beshouat, Lebanon has several stories of miraculous magnitude. But by far, Lebanon's most posthumously active saint is Mar Charbel, born Youssef Makhlouf in 1828 and who died at seventy years of age.

The hermitage in which he spent twenty-three years of solitude has to be one of the most beautiful, quiet places on earth and is located in the town of Annaya, north east of Beirut. In the winter you can't see the valley below because of the fog and you are surrounded in hip high snow all around. In the summer the weather remains sufficiently cool because of the altitude and you get a good
chance to breathe easy and free your mind from the horrors of its daily content: car bombs, dispossessed refugees crossing from the Syrian border, chemical weapons, suicide bombers killing their next of kin, aid money being mismanaged and getting wasted, professional beggars swindling people, while people who are in actual need are too proud to beg. Growing up, Mar Charbel didn't mean much to me, although, perhaps he should have since a minority of Palestinians are also Maronites, especially those living in the far nothern Palestinian village, now razed, called Kifr Bir3em where my mother's family is from.

It wasn't until 2011 and when I was living in Berkeley that I came across the legend of Mar Charbel at a friend's house. My friend is a Catholic by wishful thinking, but you do find religious iconography throughout her decor. Her research expertise revolves around central America and Spanish literature. al-Andalus sums up the extent of her encounter with the Arab world. For this reason, I was surprised when I noticed a plaque from Mexico above her stove. The picture was of Mar Charbel with Spanish writing on the bottom thanking him for the miracle he performed in Mexico. The Plaque also shows two women (perhaps it's the same woman), with one bleeding by the way side.




I naturally, inquisitioned her about where the plaque came from, the story of the women in the picture, and if she knew who the cloaked guy was. She didn't know Mar Charbel and could only guess that he had performed a miracle on the woman.

Several years later, in Lebanon of 2013 or 2014, a Muslim refugee from Syria told of her miraculous encounter with the Saint, alleging he cured her cancer. The famous Egyptian actress, Elham Shaheen, claims he had cured her mother and appeared to her. The list of his alleged apparitions and spiritual surgeries is quite extensive and multi-national and the narratives have unusual commonalties. One young man experienced what might be linked to enlightenment during one of his meditations at the hermitage in Annaya and claims to have received severe burns on his upper arm shortly following his experience of what can be described as "oneness with God."

What I like about the Mar Charbel legend is that it portrays him as a universalist Christian, metting out miracles to non-Christians as much as followers of Christ, and he is said to have been a friend to prostitutes and other outcasts during his lifetime. When he was asked his opinion on taking up arms against the Turks he was against violent confrontation. It is somewhat ironic that Mar Charbel's
iconic face came, for a short period of time, to be seen as an indicator of allegiance to the Lebanese Phalangists of the early civil war period. al-Kata'eb and their crew were responsible for the most heinous massacres of Palestinian innocents the country ever saw, including the massacre not only of Christian but Maronite Palestinians, as is the case with the fall of the Palestinian refugee camp in Dubayeh in the 1970s. As Maronites and Phoenicians, distinguishing themselves from all that which is Arab, Muslim and inferior, al-Kata'eb proudly saw themselves as the true custodians of a Lebanon partitioned in their favour by the French after the world war. To this day, the country's president can only be of the Maronite order. So much of the Christian message is often lost on Christians and it is nice to be reminded every now and then what the message was supposed to actually be.